Quick fix: itch

Because chickweed (Stellaria media) soothes most any itch almost straight away.

We had ghastly mosquitoes a few years ago, tiny black things that bit horribly, and the itch lasted for hours and hours.

They made for sleepless scratching nights.

I tried everything, including aloe leaf straight off a plant: slice it up, put it gooey side on the bite, wait for the itch to subside. It never did.. Bloody tiny black itchy mosquitoes ...

Anyway, I was teaching my usual summer week that summer, and said something about the unceasing itch to one or the other of my students. She said, why didn't I use my chickweed salve? That should work ... and it did.

I love chickweed.

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Other herbs work for itch as well: you can crush up the stems of whatever jewelweed (or other Impatiens) you have in your neck of the woods and use that. Jewelweed juice smells bad, though.

You can make a soothing bath of cool (not cold) water and oatmeal. That'll help with the full-body itchiness of measles and similar.

And you can try the slime at the base of one or the other dock. That'll help with things like nettle stings and the like.

Oh, and if you get stung by striped winged insects: it's "vinegar for wasps, baking soda for bees", but I don't know if those are American or European wasps, so I don't know if vinegar would work for our normal yellow-and-black-striped bee-sized run-of-the-mill European wasps (which might be yellowjackets in mercadian, I'm not sure). I'd like to be enlightened about that, though: anybody try vinegar on our wasps?